Tagalog Relative Clause Production: Data from Adults and Children

Tagalog uses a focus system, where verbal affixation and case marking work in coordination to mark the syntactically prominent argument. Whether Tagalog has a nominative-accusative system or an ergative.absolutive system has long been a matter of discussion among linguists. The current study investigates the acquisition of relative clauses in Tagalog using an elicited production task and asks whether the acquisition of Tagalog relativization follows previously reported findings for nominative-accusative languages or ergative-absolutive languages. The results show that the overall pattern fits that of nominative-accusative languages. The study’s child participants, however, showed a bimodal distribution, indicating that some children treat the language as nominative-accusative, while others analyze it as an ergative-accusative language.